Amazon EC2 Adding Persistent Storage
Amazon EC2 lapped up again and added EC2 persistent storage. Previously you had to store data in SimpleDB or S3 because your EC2 instances could go away at any time due to scale down and up. This is much like how on Google App Engine you need to store everything in the BigTable Datastore, because there is really no such thing as a physical location in a cloud that is elastic. But Amazon has one upped by adding persistant storage in EC2.
If you are a developer and not excited about the ability to make applications with no worry of scale or support in infrastructure, I am just not sure if you are a developer or more worried about change. I always have these ideas that end up being based on the fast that I would need at least 3-5 servers to pull off. Unfortunately when you are smaller or just trying out an idea you dont’ want to buy infrastructure for the most extreme case (large traffic spike) and then have servers sitting at 1% utilization the rest of the time. With cloud computing and service storage, this whole problem is abstracted away. Many times this is at a much reduced cost, you are only paying for minimal usage, not what your maximum usage would be.
One big element to the cloud computing rage is also that dynamic languages will win out. If you will note in all the new cloud technologies there is a recurring theme of BigTable/MapReduce datastores (eliminiating much of relational database ways), dynamic languages (removing static typing and adding flexibility for rapid deployment and development) and the developer has alot of freedom and power to innovate.
Consider cloud computing the point at which dynamic languages such as Python (maybe Jython, IronPython, etc), Ruby, and higher order parallel languages like Erlang won out. Google App Engine uses Python, SimpleDB from Amazon is built with Erlang, etc. These languages like Python and Ruby which are slower (Ruby is much much slower than Python, Python can hang with static compiled languages) but the scalability, ActiveRecord like BigTable architecture, and rapid prototyping ORMs which were previously seen as too performance intensive or slow could become moot with the power of Amazon or Google’s infrastructure.
It is just a real interesting time in technology, it a major leap, it should be recognized. If you are a developer or infrastructure specialist, you should be diving in.
Tags: amazon, cloud, ec2, google, google app engine, persistent storage, python, ruby, S3, web service